


And One Go Alone

by magistera



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 15:52:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17046518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistera/pseuds/magistera
Summary: 'After' is such a final word that Will hardly allows himself to think it for years.





	And One Go Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [archiesfrog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/archiesfrog/gifts).



'After' is such a final word that Will hardly allows himself to think it for years. He goes back home, throws himself into school and church and family like a puppy into a pile of fall-raked leaves, bickers with James and Barbara over the first turn in the shower and the last rasher of bacon, and does his best to push all thought of being anything other than an ordinary, teenage, Stanton boy out of his head.

Midwinter comes – _"W_ _hat ever happened to that butler of Miss Greythorne's?_ _"_ _James wonder_ _s_ _as they le_ _ave_ _the Manor after a round of carols, and Will shrug_ _s_ _uncomfortably, trying not to think_ and one go alone, go alone, go alone... _"Oh, you know," he sa_ _ys_ _offhandedly. "Probably moved on to another position"_ \- and Midsummer after it, and round and round the years revolve, till Will almost stops thinking of them in terms of solstices and equinoxes and light and darkness and new life and old, hoary death.

He tries to keep a watch – _My watchman, Merriman had called him_ – though he does not know what he is watching for. The Dark is vanquished, Merriman said so, and where once his life was filled with tantalizing portents, now it is only filled with classes and friends and family and all the sweet, familiar and everyday things of life. As the seasons roll on, he spends less and less time at it.

Once, while walking to school, he passes a drover urging a mass of bleating sheep down the dusty road. The man's eyes widen, and he tugs a forelock in respect as Will goes by. For a second Will feels something moving inside him, something older and sadder and stronger than he's allowed himself to remember being for a very long time. But then one of the sheep deposits a pile of damp, steaming pellets at Will's feet, and he has to dance to avoid stepping in it, and he feels it recede again, into the dark inner hallways of his mind.

It isn't that he forgets. All the memories are still there, and sometimes odd moments he'll see a rock formation and think of Trewissick, or, as with the drover, of Wales – but he's got school and then university to worry about, and with one thing and another he just finds it easier to leave all of that alone. _Just as they all went off in Pridwen, sailed off and left me alone_.

All the powers are still there, too, and undiminished by the fact that Will is the last Old One left in the mortal world. He doesn't set those aside. At first he feels a bit guilty using them for everyday things – stopping time so he can race the last quarter-mile to class on time, forcing one of his mother's chickens to quiet and calm while he works to free its head from the fence it's gotten itself stuck in – but it's too much a part of him, feels too natural, to stop. Once, he saves a child from being hit by a bus, and tells himself that maybe this is the kind of darkness, born of man, that Merriman wanted him to watch for.

***

When Mary's first child is born, he places his hand on the baby boy's forehead and closes his eyes, searching the infant's future for harm and pain and fear, and _pushing out_ in a way that he knows will place a ward of protection on the child, warning off agents of the Dark and those with ill intentions. He doesn't know how he knows this, just like he doesn't know how he knows it's similar to something Merriman did to Hawkin, although more benevolent. This is just protection, with no other intent behind it.

"You look like you're passing some kind of benediction on him," Paul says curiously from the other side of the hospital bed where Mary lays with her son.

"That's our Will," Mary says, and Will takes his hand off the baby's head, realizing that they're all giving him rather odd looks. "Always looking out for his little corner of the world."

He laughs, and passes it off as simply being overwhelmed by how tiny the baby is – "I was half afraid I'd break him just looking at him!" - but her words stick with him. _His little corner of the world_ – but the world is much bigger than Huntercombe, or even England, and Merriman meant for him to watch for – something. Will hasn't seen Merriman again since that day, despite his promise that they would meet again, but surely he meant for Will to watch more than just this little corner?

***

So he strikes out on his own. _Building a career_ , is the version he tells his family, and he's doing that, to be sure, but that's not what makes him look further and further afield each time he lights out in search of a new job. He's Watching, or at least he's trying to Watch, even if he still doesn't know what for.

In London he takes a job with a business supply firm, doing sales over the telephone, and at night he throws himself out into the streets to – Watch. He stops any number of footpads from mugging their victims or worse with an outflung hand and a firm mental command to go home and reconsider their lives. He cures a hundred illnesses, petty and serious, afflicting the poor souls sleeping rough under bridges and in doorways. He stops time – and a bus – an instant before it runs over a three-year-old girl who had toddled into the street.

And then he goes home to his flat, and drinks until the room spins, and falls into bed insensate to the world because no one else is coming – _you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, Merriman had said_ – and all the evil that man could do and all the darknesses to which he was subject are too much for just one person who had been left to _go alone_.

_"You sound different," Barbara says over the phone. "You sound so – sad."_

_"It's just getting older, I expect," Will says, even though he's already been so very much older than all of them for a very long time._

Before long, the satisfaction of solving London's petty crime problem pales in comparison to his memories of Grails and swords and world-threatening Darkness. He can't imagine that pickpockets and burglars are what Merriman meant him to watch – to Watch – for. And though he knows that each misery eased, each tragedy prevented matters to the ones he's saved from them, he finds it harder and harder to believe that it truly matters.

He takes a job in Amsterdam, selling factory machines, and then another in Brussels, wholesaling home appliances to department stores. He goes to work, and then he flings himself out into the streets, looking for something, though he's never sure what it is he's looking for, only that he doesn't find it, over and over. There's never much to pack up, each time he moves again and though he knows his family misses him, there's never anyone to say much of a goodbye to.

Sometimes, after he comes home from another evening's fruitless search, as he sits on his couch necking back his bottled oblivion, he wonders what it would have been like if they had all remembered. If they would have stuck together. Stayed in touch. Met up at a pub now and again to have a lager and talk about it all.

He wonders if Jane grew up as pretty as she looked like she'd be. He wonders if Bran is happy. He wonders how Barney's art is coming along. He knows that he could find out, or try to, if he wanted – could look them up, write a letter or even call – but they don't _remember_. They wouldn't even know why he was there.

Walking down the hill that day, after Merriman left, he had seen it in their faces. Everything they had done, everything they had been to each other. It had all faded to polite acquaintance. Will saw himself, in Jane Drew's eyes, once again becoming that odd boy, the son of her great-uncle's friend. Someone she knew only slightly. Barney and Simon were the same. Only Bran remained anything like the same warm and friendly presence at Will's side – kept even a part of the _solidity_ he had felt from all of them before – but even Bran kept shooting him puzzled looks, as though he couldn't place quite why they were so easy with each other.

And so, when they'd got to the bottom of the hill, Will waved goodbye to the Drews in a friendly fashion, and turned with Bran down the road to John Rowland's farm, and never saw them again. Not so many days after that, he waved goodbye to Bran in his turn, and got into John Rowland's truck for the ride back to the train station, and did his best to prepare himself to go on alone.

For years after that, he thought of calling them up, or later, trying to see them. But he knew it would do no good. None of them would remember, and he couldn't stand to even imagine the polite, confused look on their faces if he turned up one day, talking about Wales and harps and Dark and Light.

Only he remembers, and he was always meant to go alone.

When he tires of trying to find whatever it is in Europe, he takes a job selling computers, and lands himself in America. By now he's spent years on this undirected, fruitless search, so it's no real surprise that he lets his guard down and stops Watching for while, and throws himself into just living this life that he's almost incidentally made for himself. It's a good life – a head full of ancient knowledge and older powers turns out to be a frighteningly good foundation for a career in sales – but it's a bit of an empty one. Coming home to a well-appointed, if messy, apartment all by himself night after night gets depressing, but the early 80s are a nearly endless wheel of parties and Will flings himself into them with abandon.

The nights bleed into each other, a whirling mess of colors and lights and hastily-drunk cocktails, and Will falls into bed at the ends of them, sometimes alone, sometimes not, but always too tired and inebriated to feel that sense of something _missing_.

***

_A party in a huge, rambling old house. Will doesn't know the host, but he mingles with a will anyway, dancing in the living room, doing shots in the kitchen with half a dozen people he's just met. Out of the corner of his eye is the way he spots him first: a colorless boy about Will's own age, pale, slender, and white-haired, and oddly self-assured. When he sees Will looking at him he quirks a half smile up at him through lowered lashes, turns, and leaves._

_Gripped by a sudden flare of desire, half-formed for all its heat, Will follows the boy from room to room through the house, until at last in a hallway the boy turns, and pushes him up against the wall, and kisses him so thoroughly, with hot, demanding tongue and eagerly roaming hands, that Will is moaning and thrusting his hips against the boy's answering erection almost before he knows what's happening._

_It's fast – too fast – and hard and graceless and it shouldn't feel_ this _good but it's white and wild like springmelt, only hot, too hot, and then he's shuddering, whimpering into the boy's mouth that hasn't left his the whole time and feeling his knees beginning to buckle as the orgasm rolls over him._

_The boy pulls back a little from the kiss, surveying Will's slack face, and makes a satisfied sound. It's only then that Will sees that his eyes aren't tawny gold, but rather a watery blue._

_"You're lovely," he whispers in Will's ear. He presses his pale lips to the corner of Will's mouth, cool against the feverish pounding of Will's blood just beneath the skin, and then he turns and is gone before Will can even ask his name._

The Old One side of Will – the part that lives in his head and witnesses everything dispassionately, with the distance that comes from unfathomable age and experience – knows that this can't go on forever. Merriman set him a watch, and Will has abandoned it. But Will pushes that knowledge away, tells himself that he _needs_ this. For now. Only for now.

_A nightclub, throbbing with music and writhing bodies. A couch at the back, and a girl who looks like Jane Drew, although her name is Betsy and her voice is a soft Southern drawl. She kneels between his legs, her long hair spread over his knees like a shawl, and he lets his head drop back against the wall, his eyes hooded, as the white rushes over him._

_When it's finished, he pulls her up beside him, and kisses her, and allows himself to be dragged out onto the dancefloor, and he takes the phone number she gives him at the end of the night and knows he will never call it._

_***_

Waking up one Saturday morning after an evening in for a change, Will rolls onto his back and basks in the sunbeam pouring in through his bedroom window. The lack of a hangover is novel, and the early morning sunlight doesn't make him squint, and he feels a flash of guilt over how unusual that is these days.

 _That's enough of that, then_ , he thinks to himself, only it doesn't quite feel like him thinking it – or at least not the normal, ordinary Will who's halfway through his twenties, worried about making quota for the quarter, and moonlighting as a lush-in-training. It's Will the Old One who thinks it, and as he stares up at the ceiling above him all the dustmotes in the sunbeam sparkle in a way that doesn't come from the sun, and the air in his lungs is crisper and fresher than it's been in months, more nourishing, and _this is what it feels like_ , he thinks. _Waking up_. It's an unfamiliar feeling, for all that he's made free with his power these last few years – that feeling of nameless purpose, of knowing without knowing what he needs to do now.

 _Got to be up and about it_ , he thinks.  _Time is passing_. He can feel it, in his head - like someone's opened up his skull and planted a clock there. A ticking. A sense of  _now_ ,  _today, before it's too late_. It drives him out of bed sharper than a whip's lash.

He showers and dresses and flings himself out into the city streets, pacing their lengths and crossroads without really knowing what it is that he's looking for, only that it's time and that he'll know it when he sees it. It's nearly Midwinter, an event he hasn't thought about for some time. The last of the fall's leaves are swirling through the streets in a slight breeze, and they seem to dog his steps as he walks, rustling about his ankles like crackly dry mice. He's excited and confused at the same time – excited to be about his real business once again, but confused about exactly what it is that the Light wants of him. And all the while his head is  _ticking_ away, keeping him moving, driving him onward.

His aimless wandering takes him to a part of the city that he's never been to before, where the storefronts are faded and gray and like as not empty, and the detritus and litter are thicker on the ground. At last he finds himself standing in front of a pawn shop.

 _Here_ , Old One Will says in his head, and Will enters the store. A bell rings as he pushes the door open, but there's no one behind the counter. Will shrugs and looks around. The pawn shop is a jumble, stacked wares of every description filling the aisles and piled high on the counters. Will has to duck his head to avoid a low-hanging model airplane, which causes him to bump into a mannequin in full Revolutionary War uniform. The mannequin's bayonet nearly takes out an eye, which makes him stumble and nearly fall. He catches himself on a glass display case, and that's when he sees it.

A small, gold harp, gleaming on the red velvet lining the case under the glass. Will blinks at it stupidly. _It can't be – all this way, and it was lost – how would it end up here?_ The clock in his head is a bell tower now, and it's tolling out the joyful hour.

A cough startles him out of his reverie. "Can I help you?" Will whirls around as if he'd been doing something wrong, but the man who is now standing behind the counter merely looks bored.

He clears his throat. "The harp," he says. "Er – how much is it?"

***

He knows even as he says it that it doesn't matter what price the man names; he will pay it. But the price, when the man suggests it, is startlingly low, and a few minutes later Will finds himself blinking in the gray December light, clutching the harp and a flimsy paper receipt to his chest.

Experimentally, he runs his fingers along the strings, but they give off a discordant jangle that somehow sounds like a reproach. _Not for you_. The wind rises around his ears, whistling, and Will can feel time passing, ticking away again in his head.

Will the Old One urges him onward, and he plunges on, tucking the harp under his arm, stalking through the city streets now like a man with a purpose, his head swiveling as if he could catch the next clue even though he knows his feet will take him there whether he wills or no. All the old destiny is rising in his chest along with the excitement – questing again, though he knows not for what, and surely this means he'll soon see Merriman again, and maybe –

He stops dead on the sidewalk, drawing an annoyed look from the woman behind him who swerves just in time to keep from bumping into him. _They all forgot_ , he thinks, and his shoulders slump, all the excitement draining out of him. _They all forgot and will never remember, except for me, for I'm to go alone_.

The feeling of time passing rises up in him again, though, and it won't let him stop for long. He starts forward again, letting his feet take him where the power wills. _Even a lonely purpose is better than all these years of nothing._

Where the power wills is apparently a run-down hospital, its weathered buildings sitting glumly against the gray sky. Will frowns up at the main building, with its prominent red cross atop the facade, wondering what could be waiting for him here. Then the sun breaks free of the clouds, and just for an instant, in its glare, he sees the afterimage of a circle surrounding the cross. Suppressing any further questions, he starts up the long drive.

As he approaches the building, he sees a man out in front, smoking. An oddly colorless man, pale skin and white hair, and Will remembers the last time this happened but that doesn't stop him rushing up eagerly all the same, knowing he's probably wrong, knowing it isn't –

"Hullo, Will," Bran says, tawny eyes looking up at him as if he's been expecting him all along.

***

Explanations would take too long – catching up would take far too long – and Will still feels that _ticking_ in his head, so instead of any of that he just stands there gaping at Bran like an idiot. "What are you – I mean, why are you – "

Bran sighs, and looks away. "I'm here to visit a friend," he says. "He's – never mind. It doesn't matter." He looks up at Will again, almost shyly. "It's strange," he says. "I should be surprised to see you again – here, of all places – but somehow, I'm not. When I woke up this morning, I could feel – I just _knew_ – that something was happening." He takes a deep breath. "We – you and I – we didn't just run into each other by chance did we?"

Will studies him carefully before he answers. "How much do you remember?" he asks. Bran's blank look tells him everything he needs to know. "Look," he says, "Earlier today, I came upon a pawn shop, and I found – I saw – this is yours," Will blurts, and shoves the harp at him.

Bran takes it with an indrawn breath, running his fingers along the strings. Will notices that when he does it the notes are harmonious rather than jangly. "This – this _is_ mine, isn't it? Or it was...I thought I would never see it again." He raises his eyes to Will's, and Will can see the purpose filling them up. He can see the _memories_ filling them up. "We've got a job to be about, haven't we?"

"I think we do," Will says, and then blurts with a sheepish grin, "though I don't know what it is, yet." _But I don't have to go alone_.

Bran smiles lazily at him, and reaches out a hand. "When did we ever?"

Will takes it, and the ticking in his head stops.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear archiesfrog,
> 
> There was supposed to be a dragon. I was _planning_ on there being a dragon. But then I started writing and you know how it is - the story took itself down its own path, and I never did find the dragon at the end of it. I miss that dragon, but I hope you won't. 
> 
> You asked for Will, grown up, being an Old One on his own. I hope this story gives you a taste of what you're looking for.
> 
> Merry Christmas!


End file.
